Brian, Yahoo is much better than Google, go on... say it

Before I get into the real meat of the post let me firstly introduce Brian White - another Googler following in the footsteps of Matt Cutts sharing some great juicy pieces of information on Googling, videogames and general tech-geekery. I strongly urge you to go subscribe to his blog now. Done? Ok, cool.

Why am I talking about Brian? Well, his post on searching conventions has proved to be fantastically useful for us in the office and will be very helpful for understanding this post.

Have I raved enough about you yet Brian? Can we officially become the first whitelets?? (explanation on cuttlets here) Ok, and now for the post:

##“it”

Yep, you guessed it, the correct answer to the title of this post is not:

“my, yes actually you have a point, yahoo really is better than google”

but instead:

“it”

You see what I did there? ;-) There is a serious point however that I’d like to cover and I’m hoping that someone (Brian?!) can help me out with the answer or failing that at least raise the profile of the issue within Google. This is the issue:

##[IT project support] vs [project support]

Google doesn’t seem to be very good at determining when I’m using ‘it’ as in [bend it like beckham] as opposed to [it recruitment]. One of our clients provides IT support and I was doing some keyphrase research and Googling around and discovered some annoying tendencies. While on some search phrases Google does ok at determining the difference between the two uses of ‘it’ on some search phrases they are woefully poor. Take the following for example:

So in summary Brian - what’s going on and can you do something about it? I know that it’s getting better (because I remember trying to do some keyphrase research in the IT recruitment sector about 12 months ago and it was just painful - I remember [it job] and [job] used to return almost identical results) but it’s still incredibly annoying and can’t be returning the most relevant results a lot of the time.

Related DistilledU modules

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The web is a technical platform, and there are correct and incorrect ways of building websites. This module teaches you about these and how search engines interact with pages in order to help you diagnose problems and improve websites.